The Lost Flowers of Alice HartREADING GROUP GUIDE

Holly Ringland on writing

The Lost Flowers of Alice

Hart

Reviews

Reading Group Questions

About the Book 

Nine-year-old Alice Hart lives in isolation by the

sea, where her mother’s enchanting flowers and

their hidden meanings mostly shelter Alice from the

dark moods of her father.

After tragedy changes her life irrevocably, Alice is

sent to live with the grandmother she never knew

existed at Thornfield, the family run native flower

farm that provides a refuge to women who, like

Alice, are lost or broken; in the Victorian tradition,

every flower has a meaning to say what words

can’t. Alice settles into her new life and learns the

language of flowers to express the things that are

too hard to speak. But, as she grows older, she

becomes increasingly frustrated by the secrecy

surrounding her family story.

In her early twenties Alice’s life is again thrown into

chaos when a devastating betrayal, and a man who’s

not all he seems, combine to make her realise there

are some stories that flowers can't tell.

  

Alice begins to understand that if she is to have the

freedom she craves, she must find the courage to

possess the most powerful story she knows:

her own.

T H E L O S T F L O W E R S O F A L I C E H A R T R E A D I N G G R O U P G U I D E

Holly Ringland on writing The Lost Flowers of Alice HartThe genesis of this novel was trauma. I’ve lived with

male perpetrated violence for a lot of my life, which

silenced my voice, courage and the dream of being a

writer I’ve had since I was a child. In 2012, I started a

PhD in Creative Writing. My research looked at

traumatic experience and the process of writing

fiction. It was through this research that I discovered

Tom Spanbauer’s concept of ‘dangerous writing’,

which is the idea of going into the sore place we all

have inside of us, and writing from that place; using

fiction as the lie that tells the truth. I realised that I’d

never written from the sore place. If anything, I’d

written around it, aside it, in spite of it. Never from it.

So, my research became my own call to arms, but

threw up all kinds of questions for me. What would

become of me and my life if I wrote the thing I was

most scared to write? What story would emerge, and

how might it live in other people’s hearts, if it ever

saw the light of day? What else can trauma be made

into, other than unrememberable memories? These

kinds of questions are why I wrote The Lost Flowers

of Alice Hart.

I started writing the novel in May 2014. I’d had an

immediate-family bereavement and the madness of

grief and being so close to mortality drove me to find

the strength I needed to be bigger than my fears and

just start. I sat at my writing desk in Manchester,

uncapped my pen, and wrote the first line as if I knew

it by heart. I handwrote the first 11,000 words over

the following month.   

 

'What would become of me and my life if I wrote the thing I was most scared to write?'

T H E L O S T F L O W E R S O F A L I C E H A R T R E A D I N G G R O U P G U I D E 2

All the settings in the novel are informed by places and

people I’ve known and loved. My experience of

growing up on the southeast Queensland coast

informed my portrayal of Alice’s childhood seaside

world as much as my experience of living in central

Australia informed my portrayal of Alice’s life in the

desert. I don’t feel I could have written any of this

particular book without firsthand sensory knowledge

of and connection to the landscapes and people I’ve

fictionalised. To me, fiction is emotional truth; this

novel is wholly drawn from some level of experience

I’ve had in my life.

'To me, fiction is emotional truth; this novel is wholly drawn from some level of experience I’ve had in my life.'

T H E L O S T F L O W E R S O F A L I C E H A R T R E A D I N G G R O U P G U I D E 3

 Poring over books and botanical art, pairing native flowers with meanings was a deep

source of wonder and light while I was writing the darker, more harrowing parts of this

novel.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is for every reader who has ever felt like their voices have

been silenced. For women who doubt the worth and power of their story. For readers

who love their fiction infused with a sense of wonder, and love page-turning fiction

driven by messy characters who make the wrong choices with the best intentions. This

book is for readers who believe that stories can be the kind of magic that has the power

to change our lives.

Possibly the most beautiful part of writing this novel was

the enormous honour I had of creating the Thornfield

language of flowers. I spent the first years of my life often

playing in my grandmother’s abundant garden that grew

alongside her house and as I grew up I watched my mother

turn to coaxing flowers from dirt in her own garden. After

I moved to England in 2009, I came across the Victorian

language of flowers for the first time. As I read about this

19th century floral craze that swept across Europe, a spark

came to life in my mind. It remained there, flickering in

the background, until 2014 when I started writing Lost

Flowers. I knew from being in the gardens of the women

who raised me that Australian flora often thrives under

harsh conditions, in extreme landscapes and weather.

Thornfield and its language grew from there, as I

considered the ways we find to use our voices even when

we’re not able to literally tell our stories.

About the AuthorHolly Ringland grew up barefoot and wild in her

mother's tropical garden in Southeast Queensland.

When she was nine-years-old, her family lived in a

camper van for two years in the US, travelling

from one national park to another; an experience

that sparked Holly’s interest in cultures and

stories. In her twenties, Holly worked for four

years in a remote Indigenous community in the

central Australian desert. Moving to England in

2009, Holly obtained her MA in Creative Writing

from the University of Manchester in 2011. Her

essays and short fiction have been published in

various anthologies and literary journals. She now

divides her time between the UK and Australia.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is Holly’s first novel.

 It has now sold in twenty territories around the

world.

Reviews

T H E L O S T F L O W E R S O F A L I C E H A R T R E A D I N G G R O U P G U I D E 4

‘The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a lush, powerful contemporary novel from debut author

Holly Ringland. It revolves around Alice, who we first meet as an isolated young girl

living by the sea with a violent father and an unwell mother. When tragedy strikes, a

teenage Alice is sent to live on a flower farm run by a group of women, including her

estranged grandmother. There, she grapples with her family’s secrets and learns more

about the women who have suffered and endured throughout the farm’s history.

As Alice enters adulthood, a past betrayal forces her to flee to the central Australian

desert, a dazzling landscape, where she meets a man who is as dangerous as he is

charming. This is an engrossing novel imbued with passion and reverence for the

Australian natural world, with a cast of characters that inspire affection in the reader

even as they make mistakes. Ringland’s decision to preface each chapter with a flower

and its emotional significance is deftly handled, creating a thematic through-line that

underscores and enhances the story. Those who couldn’t put down The Natural Way of

Things will find a gentler but no less compelling journey of female survival in this novel.’

                                              Bookseller+Publisher five star review

T H E L O S T F L O W E R S O F A L I C E H A R T R E A D I N G G R O U P G U I D E 5

1. Why do you think Alice stopped talking?  

What does her muteness mean?

2. Do you think June was right to keep so much information

back from Alice?  Does this make her a bad person?

3. What do you think the ‘lost flowers’ in the title –

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart – refers to?  

Could it have multiple meanings?

4. Dogs are prominent in Alice’s life. How do they reveal the

nature of Alice’s character and of others, for example, Moss,

and Dylan?

5. What do you think motivated Oggi to write to Alice after all

those years? What was his letter trying, implicitly, to tell her?

6. The women in Lulu’s family passed down foresight. Honey

grevillea, which grows rampant in the desert, also means

foresight. What deeper meaning could be at play in how this

idea is used in the novel, for example, when we can see things

coming, does that necessarily empower us to do what’s right?

7. Many of the characters’ appearances are disclosed, but

Dylan’s is not. Why do you think this is?

8. Fear and past pain shapes the lives of characters in the

novel in varying ways. Discuss the characters you feel are

most dictated by fear and the past.

9. After the point in time where the novel ends, what do you

think Charlie will do with his third of Thornfield?

10. What’s your favourite flower and meaning in the novel,

and why?

Reading Group Questions